Stardock has an excellent add-in start menu, but it costs $4.99. It does have a 30 day trial, and has an option to take you to your desktop after you enter your password. This gives back most of the functunality of Windows 7, and is a must!!

If your PC is running Windows 8 Pro and you'd like to get Windows 8 Media Center Pack so you can watch and record live TV with Windows Media Center, you can take advantage of the following special offer: For a limited time, get Windows 8 Media Center Pack for free **

If you launch a Windows 8 app, play with it for a while, then press the Windows key you'll switch back to the Start screen. Your app will remaining running, but as there's no taskbar then you might be wondering how you'd ever find that out.

You could just press Alt+Tab, which shows you what's running just as it always has.

Holding down the Windows key and pressing Tab displays a pane on the left-hand side of the screen with your running apps. (To see this with the mouse, move your cursor to the top left corner of the screen, wait until the thumbnail of one app appears, then drag down.)

And of course you can always press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to see all your running apps in the Task Manager, if you don't mind (or actually need) the extra technical detail.

Closing an app

Windows 8 apps don't have close buttons, but this isn't the issue you might think. Apps are suspended when you switch to something else so they're only a very minimal drain on your system, and if you need the system resources then they'll automatically be shut down. (Their context will be saved, of course, so on relaunching they'll carry on where you left off.)

If you want to close down an app anyway, though, move the mouse cursor up to the top of the screen. When it turns from the regular mouse pointer to the icon of a hand, hold down the left mouse button and drag it down the screen. Your app should shrink to a thumbnail which you can drag off the screen to close it.

If that's too much hassle, then simply pressing Alt+F4 still works.

And when all else fails then press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to launch Task Manager, right-click something in the Apps list and select End Task.

Administrative tools

Experienced Windows users who spend much of their time in one advanced applet or another are often a little annoyed to see their favourite tools buried by Windows 8. Microsoft has paid at least some attention, though, and there is a way to bring some of them back.

Open the Charm bar (WIN + C) and select 'Settings' then 'Tiles'. Change 'Show administrative tools' to 'Yes' and click back on an empty part of the Start screen. And it's as simple as that. Scroll to the right and you'll find a host of new tiles for various key applets - Performance Monitor, Event Viewer, Task Scheduler, Resource Monitor and more - ready to be accessed at a click.

Disable the lock screen

If you like your PC to boot just as fast as possible then the new Windows 8 lock screen may not appeal.

Don't worry, though, if you'd like to ditch this then it only takes a moment.

If you can't easily find GPEdit.msc by searching in the Start screen, search for 'mmc', and then press Enter. On the File menu, click 'Add/Remove Snap-in', then in the 'Add or Remove Snap-ins' dialog box, click 'Group Policy Object Editor', and then click 'Add'.

In the 'Select Group Policy Object' dialog box, click 'Browse'. Click 'This Computer' to edit the Local Group Policy object, or click 'Users' to edit Administrator, Non-Administrator, or per-user Local Group Policy objects, then click 'Finish'.

Log in automatically

Of course even if you remove the lock screen, you'll still be forced to manually log in every time your system starts.

This can also be resolved at speed, though, using much the same technique as in previous versions of Windows.

Hold down the Windows key, press R, type 'netplwiz' and press Enter to launch the User Accounts dialog. Clear the "Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer" box and click OK.

Enter the user name and password of the account that you'd like to be logged in automatically, click OK, restart your system and this time it should boot directly to the Start screen.

Mount ISO files in Windows 8

Need to take a closer look at an ISO file? Right-click it in Explorer, click Mount and you can view it as a virtual drive, launch the files it contains, or add more if you like.

You can also access the Charms Bar using "Win+C" keyboard shortcut. Although the Charms Bar was designed to help Windows 8 users in quickly accessing these system tools, it becomes quite annoying when you move the cursor to top-right corner of screen to close a window or other tasks and the Charms Bar automatically appears on screen.

This Registry tweak will disable the Charms Bar hint in Windows 8. It'll not disable the Charms Bar but it'll turn the Charms Bar hint off, so the Charms Bar will not appear as soon as you move the cursor to top-right or bottom-right corners. But it'll appear if you move the cursor to top-right corner and then move it downwards. Same will happen with bottom-right corner.

Also the hotkey "Win+C" will also show the Charms Bar.

So if you apply this Registry tweak, you'll not accidentally get the Charms Bar on screen. It'll only appear when you actually want it.

1. Press "WIN+R" key combination to launch RUN dialog box then type regedit and press Enter. It'll open Registry Editor and go to following key: